


Eucharist

by Albrecht_Starkarm



Category: Black Lagoon (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Child Abuse, Child Soldiers, Cruelty, Emotional Retardation, F/F, F/M, La Violencia, Mayhem and Slaughter, Nightmares - Waking and Otherwise, Obvious Paraphrenia, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychosis, Religious Obsession, Roberta's Canonical Pedophilia, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:15:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26682025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albrecht_Starkarm/pseuds/Albrecht_Starkarm
Summary: He is her anchor in life.  Her domestication's keeper, the Master with his soft white fingers wrapped around her leash.He is beautiful.He is only twelve, but what had she done at twelve, so many years before even that?He is her salvation.He is her God.And after all, isn't the sacrament about taking God into yourself?
Relationships: Rosarita "Roberta" Cisneros/Garcia Lovelace
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	Eucharist

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone cares, Suilen's "Zakuro" is a fantastic companion to this piece with its sludgy guitar and haunting voice.

The dreams came exactly the same way. Every time. It wasn't they were every night. At least, they hadn't been for awhile. Sometimes, they were a predictable march, enough to have her clutching at her neck, nails smoothed down, blunt and shiny with the bright polish lacquering them to diamond-hard non-edges.

She'd sit up and feel the furrows clawed in her skin.

Know she'd be dead if she didn't trim them.

She wanted to see it. The End. Huge long red-dripping The End. It would've been so much easier, wouldn't it?

Darkness didn't even have the decency to eat her soul and leave nothing else. It was only gloom, a misty blue brooding on the horizon. The jungle was a presence. Like always. They couldn't be anywhere else. The palms were jagged smiles against the marble's soft smooth pillars. The moon bulged gibbous silver, a broke-jawed grin.

It smiled at me.

She.

At her.

It was easier, wasn't it? Throw yourself out in the third person. Sometimes I wondered if that was true, if maybe the first-person wasn't the real shelter. You could hide in your head, behind all the subjectivities, know absolutely nothing except what you wanted to see and wanted to hear and that was probably true.

Unless you didn't have anywhere to hide in your own goddamned head. Then it got a little harder.

I saw it again. Ten thousand times, I saw it again. In a familiar place but off-kilter, time bloated and heavy, every second a hundred million years. Species rose and died and rotted and turned into gooey black tar bubbling out of the broken red dust in the time it took you to breathe but then the moments were ticking over like an odometer on the space shuttle.

He laughed.

He wouldn't stop laughing. I was the girl in the dream but I wasn't, either. I could feel the muscle bulge in my arms, the legs long and smooth planes turning iron-hard and sharp at a twitch. Except it wasn't his face and it was the same face, too. He was beautiful.

My God, oh God, oh Jesus Lord of All in Heaven, he was beautiful. Beautiful like he always is. The hair a nest of silken clichés, white gold and pleading to be touched. Smoothed and stroked. His shoulders slender and the skin like it always was, untarnished by the sun, no color at all because he didn't need the color. He wasn't a savage like me, like the other maid with the too-big breasts for her too-small body, the way she stalked around on her chunky little kitten heels and preened for him.

Smiled for him.

The way she'd sink close when she should've been dusting and her voice would come syrupy and sweet with her fucking Venezuelan accent, another stray dog the Master brought in. Except I wasn't a dog at all and I'll never be.

I want to be.

Jesus, I want to be. No one wants to see a wolf framed in their bedroom door unless they've got a few essential screws loose and I didn't want that for him. A dog is smooth, soft, gentle, a graceful thing won't ever bite you unless there's something _really_ wrong with the pup or more importantly something wrong with you.

But a wolf will bite you because its fur is coarse and matted with blood and its eyes shine yellow through the shadowy undergrowth where it lives. You know it from its growl, its voice's soft rumble.

You know it from its hunger.

My daddy was a hunter. My granddaddy was a hunter.

There are no wolves in Colombia and there are no foxes, either, but the little maid was still a fox. No different than wolf except softer, smaller, the teeth not as big but their smile still bristling cold white.

I didn't want her in the same room as the young master. He didn't deserve the pollution, the stain of shit and street dirt no amount of fine soaps rich with bergamot and vanilla could ever polish off her skin.

I wanted to bathe it away like the sweat. It wasn't going away. Not even when I sat under the shower and burned out the water heater and almost felt my skin flake away. No matter how much you scrub, just like my daddy told me, you'll never be any different than what you are.

The room was beautiful. The Master told me he didn't really need a maid. The manor was vast but there were about five or six staff. It was the Victorian plague; the genteel poverty of a noble family gone to rot. The Master, Master Diego, he stood there under the shadow of its crest and told me something he said was a vow.

_Rosarita, Roberta, whatever name you want, you will never want for anything the rest of your life._

The Master was always plump, that paternal look without hunger in the eyes except for his son's future. He never touched me. For three months, five, six, ten, a year, I'd waited for his shadow to creep through the door. Waited and listened to the unfamiliar ceiling's flex and the walls' groan and the animals' shrill hooting and squawking outside, the birds and lizards with their calls stark and alien to someone lying in a bed, all the acoustics wrong, but he was only there every morning at breakfast.

He'd always smile up at me from the little glass table set out on the veranda. He'd made his own breakfast, sometimes the eggs overdone, sometimes underdone, but the coffee always perfect, yesterday's newspaper 'cause the delivery was dismally slow unfurled over the table and living yesterday with the same slow nonchalance he lived everything.

_Come, come, Rosa- ah, Roberta_

That smile. The warmth in the eyes.

He knew he was talking to a wolf he hadn't even tried to domesticate. He just pretended I was a dog and hoped it took.

_Come and have some coffee with me, won't you?_

When you domesticate a wolf, you don't reach out and touch it. You'll lose your fingers or at least your naïveté about it. But he did. He wanted the wolf next to him, wanted his beautiful young son, his only son, his only meaning in the world in the silver shadow of the woman in the ten thousand portraits scowling with her smile more blinding more oppressive than any sun in oil and photography, the beauty who ate Master Diego's heart and took it with her.

I understood. Understood it too well.

Death is easy.

No.

Death is nothing. The Japanese called duty heavier than heaven and dying lighter than a feather and glorious like a broken piece of jade instead of a slate roofing tile surviving forever and they always said life was cheap and death was even cheaper but all of that was bullshit.

Death meant nothing. Life meant nothing.

If you wanted to attach a price to death you could. God knew I had a hundred times, two hundred times, the negotiations hushed in the dingy cantinas under rusting galvanized iron roofs, the heat in the dim yellow and red lights, the whores' quiet negotiations, forever the same siren's song as that goddamned city at the end of the world.

_How much for anal?_

_Do I hafta wear? Oh, c'mon, baby, y'ain't got nothin'a worry 'bout. C'mon. I'll pay extry._

The guttural wet curl of voices in the half-darkness and only the worst mistake having one of the dipshits stumping up to my table. The eyes were always enough. I'd turn my stare up at them and they'd give you a look like not like somebody'd stepped or even danced the samba on their grave but had pushed a shovel in their hand and told 'em to start digging.

Now.

I'd done it more than once. It wasn't even you didn't have a grave ready. It was so they'd know. So you'd listen to what the shrinks' flat mumbly dogma over big bristling graying Freud beards would call the Stages of Grief.

Except Acceptance never came. It was supposed to be the end.

But that was my job. The shovel's rasp and scrape in the wet earth turning up its cold stink of rot, knowing forever because forever is only how long your life lasts, an eternity condensed into an hour, two, three, sometimes the metal clinking on rocks and pebbles and sometimes scratching around bigger stones and they'd look out into the jungle at its edges in a lonely clearing under a blue blanket of starlight or the moon silvered like a mirror and they'd see eternity tightening its web around them with sweat gummy on their fat necks the landowners never having known labor and their pink soft hands bleeding with puffy ragged sores and they worked faster and faster, you'd see it, you'd see the passion like they could cut their way to the next life born from their labor.

In the jungle, death is life. Life is death. Deeper and deeper and the roots cut hungry into the dirt and the spiders and snakes roost in the tangled knots of life millions of years old in its unbroken course alongside the river's quiet recitation of the same poem it's known for a thousand times that and still working through the lines and the phosphorescent green rot of ten million dead things is the cold false light of a new world under the triple canopy, hoisted up the creepers living off the death of the great trunks with their crabbed heavy bark looking like an old man's face in the phantom glow of his cheap hand-rolled cigarette.

They know and you know dead animals and rotting plants fuel the world in its turn. Not just the engines eating dead Tyrannosaurs but the glow sucked up through the shoots and vines and the mushrooms sprouting like Hades' own parody of the Garden of Eden showing you life is made from death.

Death fuels everything.

Death didn't belong in Master Diego's home. He told me that was the one absolute, the one sure unconditional rule he would enforce, the rule that _had_ to be.

Master Diego asked me to come with him, to stand under the crossed swords with their faded chipped edges and their silvered filigree he told me had been brought with Pizarro's men to this place, had eaten the blood and brought a curse to the family.

"It is every Lovelace's destiny, you know." Master Diego had grown fat. He said it was his pride to get fat.

_Every man should eventually get fat, his wife's patience allowing._

The fat man turned. She'd seen the pictures of his youth. The word was maybe even _dashing_. The pencil-fine Clark Gable mustache and the brawny arms and the trim swimmer's shape in a fine suit, a bowler hat, an arm wrapped around his wife's.

Her name never came to anyone.

Garcia was too young to remember.

Master Diego said her name belonged to him, and only to him. It was the one time I'd seen him not just cry but weep. His palms flattened on his face, his shoulders hitching, that hideous sound I'd heard ten thousand times and brought, well, only god knew how often. It sounded like laughter, shaking, but slowed like wading through aspic. _Ha ha ha ha ha_.

He was wasted, a wine bottle emptied out in two glasses with only one drunk, the wine he said had been given as a wedding gift. He opened one every year for their anniversary.

_Our family gave us one hundred bottles, you see. It's a tradition in the Lovelace clan to give every newlywed couple a hundred bottles. We only made it to ninety. I have seventy-eight left, Roberta. Seventy-eight bottles left and then..._

Master Diego's eyes left his face and his mouth lay on the floor, twitching and shaking.

What was her name, Master Diego?

_I- I cannot tell you, Roberta._

I didn't push it. I stood there, a tray folded over my belly, feeling the hard metal twitch against harder flesh without any softness at all. I'd started wearing the clothes like something more than a uniform, but they weren't perfect for me.

The stockings, milky and soft, they felt like being bathed in wet fog. The petticoats and skirts and dress were a million tons.

The braids turned my scalp into a bitching fandango.

The glasses were heavy on my big peasant nose.

I'm sorry, Master Diego. I did not mean to pry-

_You don't understand, Roberta. I- you could find her name. Anywhere in this house. In our albums. On our marriage license. But her name- the name I know, her voice, her face, they all belong to me. I will take them with me because they will lead me back to her._

Master Diego was in his private study. Master Garcia knew he should stay away from his father on February 24. Everyone knew that.

Even the other maids and the butler told me, Roberta, please, don't bother him, all right? It'll just get you in trouble.

I wanted to know. To know why.

I brought him a cup of coffee and he thanked me, said no one ever had the courage to watch him cry.

 _Amazing, no?_ That laughter through the tears. _I'm the one crying like a child and they're the cowards for not wanting to see it._

But I told him I understood.

It's easy to cry, really. But seeing someone you care about and being helpless-

_Yes, yes, I think you're right._

He always listened to Chopin on February 24. I didn't know the piece 'til he told me. I liked it, the fingers slow but deliberate, not teasing but chiseling the notes in their sharp high strokes out of the quiet. His Nocturne, Op 9, No 1.

The recording was Brigette Engerer but he said his wife, his beloved wife, the blonde wraith looming high over every mantelpiece, from every picture frame, out of every hallway like God, she was an even better pianist.

_And I have some recordings. I begged her to make them. She thought she was no good, but she was a brilliant pianist. She played for the Philharmonic in Bogotá before we were married. It was where we met._

I could believe it. The fingers were long.

Nothing like mine. Not a peasant's, brute, traced with jagged scars, callused with a rifle's or a pistol's or a submachine gun's stock in negative.

They must have been soft.

Did she hold her son and feel Death creep over her shoulder, a soft whisper on the balmy malarial winds: _This will not be yours. Even your name will be too much for him to take._

Did Death come to the others, also?

Could I have killed her?

I asked him once. When it wasn't February 24 and Diego stared up at the crossed sabers that had known so much innocent blood and the pistols with their old timeworn wood and the muskets and their steel lockwork and intricate scrimshaw.

He told me the Lovelace family had been cursed.

_From England, you know. Ages ago. The sixteenth century. Even our name means Outlaw. Our family bears the burden of what it's done._

_All our wealth is tainted with it. All our riches and our legacies are polluted. It's why I thought perhaps Garcia_ , Diego's voice thickened, got dark, and he turned away from the fire and looked up at the big family portrait he'd had painted when Master Garcia was six and so beautiful, such a fine vision of platinum-bright hair and big expressive hazel stare and that little dog as a puppy with black nose and beady black teddy bear eyes peering through a white cloud. _I thought perhaps he should take his mother's name._

_But she wouldn't hear of it. She... When she grew sick, she told me she'd never be able to be happy knowing our memories would die with our son's name. There should be another generation of Lovelaces, raised by a man as kind as you, given our love together. My sisters and brothers already carry my family's name into the future._

_Do you understand, Roberta?_

I looked up at the swords. The fireplace popped and orange-yellow sparks floated through the grate, just a few of them. The fire heated my skin and burned away the night's damp.

It was never cold there. Not really.

I understood.

_My son must be raised a kind boy. He must know only love without cruelty and violence. Joy untempered by sorrow. Beauty without ugliness. Do you understand, Roberta?_

I understood.

Before that, I'd never felt it. Never like that. It wasn't a newspaper slapped on my nose but it was a plea in the dark to the shaggy nightmare howling at the moon.

You must be there for him. You must protect him. You must never raise your hackles, show your fangs, let him see your lope.

You must be his guardian, silent, unstinting. You must smile and believe it. You must laugh and let it brighten your eyes.

I nodded. I wanted to laugh.

To smile.

To be perfect for him.

She was his Goddess, and Garcia is my God.

Every day, I tried harder. It wasn't like Las FARC. There was no passion there. Yes, there was mania. Yes, there was hunger. Yes, there was anger. My god, the anger.

Just and good.

Arrogant and dogmatic.

But it was nothing but anger there. Sitting behind the lines and listening to the rage froth and stepping around the cripples from the autodefensas' minefields and their chainsaw examples made children with ragged stumps and blank empty eyes, the girls bloated with their rapists' their gang-rapists' kids and pleading with us with hands outstretched not for alms but just for a bullet, Por favor, how much can one bullet cost? Kill me.

An eleven-year-old girl with a swollen gut and gaunt cheeks stripping off her pants, standing in the one little dirt lane snaking through a clutch of brokeback huts under the milky blue mountain shadows, rusting iron roofs echoing with pelting rain like a hail of baseballs and rotting creaking walls and the old men with their peasant Indian faces and tobacco-blackened teeth and spitting coca in jagged clods in the ditches overflowing with sewage scummed black and green, Here are my scars, do you see, do you see, here are my scars, like Jesus, yes? Hysterical laughter fountaining out of her mouth, the milky dragon's spine of stripes down her legs and to her ankles and that's what she meant, like the crucifixion, or at least half of it, and she showed us down to the sagging board close to the riverside where they nailed down the girls who wouldn't obey and open up their legs nicely.

Do you see? Do you see?

And then walked into the river gorged with rain and washed away.

Her father said he would join Las FARC, yes, what must I do?

Her mother, also. She had strong hands and once trained as a nurse in Medellín years and years ago, she said it fifteen times while she walked alongside us, her father begging to carry our packs, I will be your mule, I will be an animal, just as long as you give me a rifle that I might kill, kill even one of the autodefensas, yes? Yes? Please. Please, I beg of you, let me kill even one.

Her father, Rodolfo, we ordered him to take a rifle with one bullet and shoot one of the autodefensas' kid-soldiers, a fifteen-year-old, once we'd trudged back to the camp. It was seven days, long, tedious, waiting under the triple-canopy and listening to the drumming rain bending long green fronds and eating cold rations and Rodolfo and his wife Jimena with panicky animal eyes whenever they heard the yanqui gunships drone overhead.

 _Shhhhh_. They cannot hear you over the sound of their own scared hearts.

Rodolfo looked the kid-soldier in the eyes and this kid-soldier, you see, he had done nothing except belong to the autodefensas. That wasn't the point. Most soldiers, they do nothing their entire lives but belong.

That is why they are evil.

Rodolfo's fingers quavered on the old Kalash's stock. He tried. I know he tried, watching the scrawny fifteen-year-old boy with a dead stump of an old cigarette guttering down between his lips, his eyes open and seeing nothing after waiting lashed to the tall splintering wooden picket at the jungle's edge. His fingers tried to find the trigger. He turned to me and asked: Why? Why don't you let me kill an autodefensa? Why must I kill a- a little boy? My god, what did this little boy ever do? Look at him. Look at him. Like my nephew.

I remember my face. How it looked. Reflected in his rumpled old-man face even if he was no older than my father, maybe younger, the way their pathetic lifeless lives aged them. His wife had the nucleus of beauty but the creases and lines were deep and she looked like she should have been fifty, sixty, but she was only thirty-eight.

But her eyes, her eyes showed the fire that didn't touch her husband.

I told him: Sir, father, shh, don't you see? That's why you need to kill him. He looks like your nephew. They could be anyone. Your father, your son, your wife, yourself. The Revolution's enemies must all be killed. Your weakness is your daughter's death. Are you weak?

His voice got high and brittle and he tried to puff up his chest. Tried to stare me down because he thought he should be taller but he wasn't. I had almost a foot on him.

I'm not weak. I'm not- not weak, goddammit. I'm not weak. Give me a man to kill, and I'll kill-

His wife, Jimena, she looked like the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen at that second. I remember the sound of his nails on the roughened old stock when she jerked it out of his hands and swung the Kalash to her shoulder. She said she'd never shot a gun before, How am I supposed to kill a man with only one bullet? Is it easy?

I told her to aim with the rifle's muzzle and follow it to its destination. To start with that, align the target between the sight's brackets, center the front post- there you go.

She pulled the trigger and the boy jerked like a movie. Frothed pink from his lips and juddered with a pants-shitting seizure like a roadkilled animal and the woman needed to stalk up and beat him with the stock until he finally stopped, Jimena's voice ragged, Please, please, my Lord, just die, why won't you die? until his head came open with a soft _crunch_ like an egg under a boot melting into wet dirt.

He was a beautiful boy. I will always remember it. Taste it in the dark dripping places between my eyes. The way they used him, took him aside, the way his screams rippled out of the dark place where they always brought the young and beautiful ones. They hitched and trembled and faded in and out like listening to wheels rattle down a washboard road.

He was screaming.

Sobbing.

And then there was nothing. The way his eyes got watery and shallow like looking in a puddle on the street washing around the crocodile-cracked pavement and stone. The way he smiled when ordered to smile, the way I knew he sucked cock when ordered, _Yes, thank you_.

The girls fucked him, too. Even Sarah, my best friend, she fucked him. She asked me to watch. She turned to me one evening in the commissary and she said she knew about the pretty-boy, don't _you_ wanna do it? He'd probably drop it in his fuckin' pants seeing you, Rosarita, right? Goddamn, you're so pretty. I'm amazed you don't have a boyfriend.

Sarah was pretty. Prettier than I am, I think. The soft skin only tanned and not naturally brown, not Indian like mine, not a peasant's skin. She was from the city and she'd learned to read in school instead of squinting in the flickering half-dark of some musty cabin under Comandanta's Josefina's patient tutelage, Marx and Engels next to _There Are Three Puppies_ , laboriously sounding out the words, a nine-year-old totally unlettered and hopelessly ignorant.

Watching the puppies on the old frayed pages like the Sabuesos daddy used to hunt with, the baying hounds ate better than we did, the hounds who were more important than anything else. Their blood-hungry muzzles soft under my palms, the way they'd shrink away when I stepped back from the jungle, taller, dripping with brimstone, a wolf's smile peeling my lips off my fangs.

I loved those puppies. I love the Sabuesos. I loved daddy and mama, also, but what did love mean then?

They pulled back their ears and flattened their snouts in the dust and whimpered when they heard my steps no one else did.

Daddy stepped out in the jungle, slowly, quietly, a wraith in the half-darkness. His fingers rough and the Sabuesos shivering in their pen.

_Rosarita, you must listen to me. You cannot come back here again._

I saw my eyes reflected in his face. The pain but the relief, too.

The funeral they held for me in the words stirring softly in the gloom.

_I know a man, Rosarita. Our family have worked for his sometimes in the past. On-again-off-again. I remember... Don Diego, he is a good man, Rosarita. Twenty years ago, when he was much younger, he told me to come to him if I ever had any troubles. I know this family; the Lovelaces. They do not lie. It's their bond and their honor not to lie. He will honor this promise. Tell him about-_

Daddy's eyes black like mine, like mama's, pulled deep back in his rumpled creased lids, a face heavy-boned and compact and drawn tight 'til the light tapered down to a little pinprick.

_Tell him about..._

_Tell him about me. He will remember._

Yes.

You are not daddy.

But you will not tell your daughter your name like a stranger.

I hate you.

I hate your cowardice, your selfishness.

I love you and your big warm hands and the way you taught me killing with compassion is as much a gift as life. I love the Sabuesos' soft fur under my palms, the way their tongues flop on your fingers, the way they'll take the tiniest morsel from your hands with the same mouths they wrap around an animal's neck and bring it to ground wailing and screaming and crunch its fragile bones so delicately and so decisively it suffocates without another whimper, without even breaking the skin.

Sarah looked up at me with her eyes glassy with lust and something more important than that. She was there because most people were there for a reason. The Workers' Revolution, Socialism's triumph, those things mattered very little, I remember.

Remembered less than they did to me. After all, I had nothing else. What other joy could there be in a life not even lived in your own body?

Let me tell you something, me.

Let me tell you something about me, me. Let me tell you something about Rosarita, about the woman leering back at me from the mirror, the woman with the broad shoulders almost like a man's, the sinewy long heavy-braided muscle, the skin grown a little paler but never milky-soft and fragile like Sarah's naturally deserved.

I will tell you about what ideals mean. The woman in the mirror is even beautiful, the way I've heard from more than one _he_ , from many _shes_ , also. From Comandanta Josefina when I was thirteen and no longer unlettered, the way her fingertips found my jaw, her lips soft and wet and hot on the nape of my neck, bathing me in her steaming breath, the water splashing on my thighs firm and tight and over the shapes she adores with palms the only smooth part of her hands, her tongue rolling up my ankle and calf and different from the arrogant men who only want it quickly, to prove to themselves it works, it turns a woman weak and submissive, to have my knees around my ears or from behind like a dog, fuck me, make me howl like an animal, moan like a whore, they say, except when do whores really moan with joy when they're only watching the space behind your head, studying the wall, piecing together the broken shapes in the cracked paint?

No, I moan for her like a woman, her face between my thighs, nails ripping at the crisp sheets under my back, heels dangling off her back. Comandanta Josefina's bones proud and her nose big and hawked and her lips cruel but sweet for me, only for me, she lies, her eyes transfixing me like a hawk in the half-darkness whipped with orange lantern light.

The woman in the mirror when I sit and watch the sweat creep down your face, me, she looks nothing like what she should. She should be maternal, shouldn't she, and kind, and gentle, except she looks nothing like it. Her arms are too long and her legs, also, and the facets are sharp and severe and even after the creams and the lotions and, yes, the doctors Master Diego brought to me, not out of lust but out of love, his smile tight when he asks me: Rosarita, Roberta, do you want to forget? I... I know a doctor, a discreet doctor, he'll take away your scars from you.

Don't you think healing your body might be the first step?

Yes, Master Diego.

Yes.

But I still feel them. Some of them are too hard-crusted in my skin, but some I'd know the way I've always known them, always known my own feet, my own hands, my legs' shapes. The way the stockings soften them, artifice like the makeup Comandanta Valeria taught me what Comandanta Josefina would never understand, the way a woman doesn't just become a hole but a vision, an obsession. The way the shapes are exaggerated or magicked away. The way even a homely woman can become beautiful and a beauty surfaces from the stark lights like a goddess.

Comandanta Valeria told me I could become a goddess.

Her voice sticky and wet in my ear.

_But only if you want it, Rosarita. I can do nothing about those eyes of yours. No, no, not the shapes. I'm talking about what's inside them. To turn into the goddess a man wants, a woman wants, you have to look into their eyes and become like mist molded by the breeze. You need to see them so they'll never really see you._

Comandanta Valeria had killed fifty men. It made her a demoness by any way of looking at it but they were all in close-quarters, too, fingers wrapped around necks with their cocks twisted inside her, kneecapped with the body's own weakness while she strangled the light out of their eyes. Daggers misting her perfect amber skin red. Arms suddenly growing muscle the way she taught, the way she told me you could keep the strength out of your flesh slumbering against the bone, a python around throats. A pistol's cough through a suppressor can turning the bath's warm mist acrid with gunsmoke.

She taught me how to smile.

The woman in the mirror with her big breasts, her flat belly, the way it holds tight up against her spine even when she leans over to knead the lotion up and down her long legs. Her hands aren't rough anymore. They're still callused because those are tattooed so deep they'll never leave. The only change is the new shapes, the trays, the pencils cradled in her fingers, guidance for Master Garcia through some of his lessons.

The unlettered girl teaching a noble son.

_No, Master Garcia, you see, this declension..._

_I'm sorry, Master Garcia, but that's not the equation's solution._

His eyes indict me. Soft and gentle, the glance floating up under his big lashes like a woman's.

_Where'd you learn all this trigonometry, anyway?_

How can I tell him it's something scratched out on a notebook with a little calculator for the perfect firing solution, a few hundred meters away, a kilometer away, the longest shot two kilometers two thousand meters two million millimeters, all the inexorable slow inchworm increments, the man not even a man in the scope that turns their eyes intimate and close when they're nearer and instead just a shadow across the wind-whipped field, arrogant in his complacency, across the charred-black slashed-and-burned stubble and the animals torn out of their homes screaming and the heat shimmering and wavering in the dead torpid air.

The .50 humped for seven days behind the lines, slow inexorable tedious work, the last two days on my gut at the jungle's edge waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Slopped with mud and with the rain's inexorable drip-drip-drip water torture on my head and unknown even to the spiders pricking my shoulders and the snakes' soft undulation on my back.

Buried in the earth and watching through the scope. The Cuban sniper's voice in my ear. Luisa. I only ever knew her as Luisa.

She was beautiful. Negrita with skin like polished anthracite and knifing gray eyes and her scalp stubbled like the burned-over grass. Luisa with her divine muscles. She never blinked.

I knew patience before Luisa but Luisa hardened it into a faith.

The sniper's craft is not marksmanship. The marksman is a tame lion, eager for the shot, hungry for the glory, knowing a meal is always coming. But the sniper is the starving tiger in the jungle. The tiger inhabits the jungle, lives the shadows, and waits. And waits.

The sniper will wait for the perfect shot.

It was a hell wait. It wasn't a usual op because I didn't even have my spotter with me. Just the yanqui McMillan in its drag bag and a Kalash with two mags and five rounds for the .50. My pistol. My knife.

Waiting.

Eyes numb.

What did she look like then while she waited?

The man stepping out on his veranda, all the fruits of the counterrevolution, all the corruption, all the hunger, all the young girls' bodies eaten alive in cannibalism and the shadow resolving into its shape. The trigger pulled, smartly, crisply, the way she showed.

It's bad cliché to say you _squeeze_ the trigger. Don't do that. The trigger should break cleanly; it should come as a surprise to your body and your rifle.

Even with the can, it was loud. So loud there was thunder through a clear sky, and then the wait, the wait, a fifty-gram bullet spit faster than the speed of sound out of the barrel and still waiting one, two, three, four seconds.

The figure split in half, coffee a long dark shadow trailing behind the cup still clutched in the figure's left hand and the left hand on the left arm on the body but half the body still standing on the porch.

How does she tell the boy this is why she learned her math?

She doesn't.

I can't.

I will never.

I can never.

He is my God, after all. You confess your sins to the priest so they will never reach God's ears.

The stockings glow white against my legs. Not the opaque ones I wear for my uniform but fine, sheer. Silk. Bought with the money Master Diego pays me like any other employee, because that's what I'm supposed to be.

Standing there, hair matted with sweat to my back and deflated, sun slanting orange-red through the window and the cars grumbling up the dirt path and Master Diego with his soft gentleman's fingers wrapped around his demitasse craning out of the window with its high railing and metal pickets and waving to the thugs in their toy-soldier costumes who must give him their lordly deference.

_A woman? Well, you're welcome to look around, but the only women you'll find here are maids. And I'll make sure your superiors know of my unhappiness if you hassle any of my staff._

I watched. Watched the way the lie took life and floated off his lips.

They left, roared back down the path I know so well now to the gate.

Master Diego turning to me.

_Would you care for some coffee, Señora Cisneros?_

Señora.

I told him no, stick it up your ass, I'm only here 'cause of my dad, asshole.

Master Diego shrugged.

_Well, I'm sorry, but the coffee is very good. I roast it myself. It's a technique I learned in Italy. Have you ever been to Italy?_

It didn't sound like mockery out of his mouth. It sounded naïve, sincere, like a savage from the bush'd ever been off the continent much less walked in the shadow of the Pantheon.

I sat down for coffee with him the next morning after I'd showered, after I'd carved off the filth, and he gave me the same offer.

Orange juice, perhaps?

A shrug.

_It's a tragedy, isn't it? It's from America._

He picked at zapote glistening with sugar scattered like snow.

_We have groves of oranges and the crooks run our country so badly we have to import Tropicana. It tastes like cardboard. I don't blame you._

I didn't know what he wanted from me.

I asked him: Are you looking for, what, for some kind of easy lay? 'cause if that's what you're after-

I was going to say, _I don't mind_ _. I can pay my way. You'll love it, I'm sure._

But he threw up a hand.

_Don't ever say that to me. Do not ever think I'm interested in you or any woman for your bodies. I'm a married man, after all. I love her in a way that keeps me even from thinking about it._

I thought she was on vacation.

I didn't even know she'd died years before for a month.

When he showed me the getup I thought he was fucking crazy. But I understood it. The long skirts and petticoats and the opaque white stockings without a tinge of the alluring color surfacing through it like a flush in a woman's cheeks. The chunky inelegant black leather shoes. The gloves and-

_Will you wear your hair up in braids, Rosarita?_

He set his fingertip on his lips.

_No. That isn't your name. Not anymore. Is it?_

He said I must be domesticated.

Not a wolf.

Roberta.

Roberta is a homely and kind name, isn't it?

Yes.

Roberta.

All girls are named _Maria_ by God.

Their given names are from their families, and not God.

Listen to the tight bands snap on my thighs. Watch the woman's skin burn dark-shaded through the fine silk. The shoes that aren't inelegant and sexless. High. Creaking white, polished patent leather.

The way her eyes grow larger and hungrier, wreathed in dark shadow, lashes long with the mascara. Lips polished like blood on my skin. Too-hard edges smoothed, foundation thicker than anyone but the dead and Comandanta Valeria have ever seen, perfectly shaded into my skin.

Some women wear it paler.

It's pointless unless you're going to wear it everywhere.

The woman in the mirror is beautiful. Her eyes needed to be kind, so I made them that way, or maybe the domestication took.

I couldn't know.

How could you know until you reached out to the wolf?

The dream haunted me. The dream with the beautiful hazel eyes under their heavy lashes and the hair soft like a woman's, no, not like a woman's. Not like mine. Even brushed back, perfected in the shower's curtain of mist like Morgan LeFay surfacing out of the forest. A tinge of bergamot and vanilla.

His mother's perfume delicately dripped on my neck. My wrists. Not from her bottles but from one bought discreetly in town, skulking around the racks, a soft whisper with eyes cowering under my glasses to the old woman with skin loose and ruffled around her neck, the kind look of a naïf.

_Oh, you're the Lovelaces' maid, aren't you? My, what a pretty girl you are._

The rattle and clank of engines when the door swung open with its bell's flat clang.

Loping cams and movement and the visceral reflexes snaring every muscle.

Don't turn.

Be ready to kill whoever stands behind you-

_Ah, Señora Dominguez! Yes, yes, your order is ready! Just one moment._

The perfume shop bathed in fragrances never warring and with a harmony that made mockery of the world outside. The clean white walls and neatly-arranged shelves and the stucco half-window from the back where an unseen hand delivered the fine little bottles a local glazier blew in a store with the earth melting in long dripping streaks and molded with his hands and his lips back into impossible shapes.

When I walked in, Señora Costaño looked up from behind the weathered wood still clinging like the woman to a tinge of color in its sun-faded facets under light so bright spilling through the dusty panes and into the shop with its still sluggish air made me think I'd walked into a dream. The quality of a daydream when you're half-asleep in the too-rich glow like a puppy but it doesn't glower at you and instead it wraps itself misty white around your neck and your shoulders and drags you into half-formed fantasies.

Señora Costaño's skin looked like a turkey's around her throat, the eyes pulled back into deep pits, but they were like the light. They were kind.

_My, what an interesting getup you're wearing, young lady. I haven't... Oh, my, you're just like the little one, aren't you?_

She laughed. Señora Costaño's laughs always reached her eyes, pinched them closed. She'd set one slender arm with its drooping skin on her bird's chest and then cradle the other's elbow and put her fingertip on her lips.

Her teeth were like old ivory, hard and yellowed and square and perfectly sure.

_She was so shy. Asking about perfumes. Does she have a boyfriend, by any chance?_

I wanted to drip death in the shop.

I shook my head and gave her the smile I'd rehearsed ten million times until I didn't know who it really belonged to at all.

Well, I don't know, ah-

_Costaño. Beatriz Costaño._

She nodded; it shook her powdery brittle gray hair.

_My, what a beautiful young woman you are. You must be from the Lovelace estate. Yes. May I interest you in anything? **You** must have a boyfriend. If you don't, you're a nun._

She laughed again. Showed me around the racks with the ready-made perfumes, each in their own neat bottles in neat little metal baskets.

I asked her, softly, discreetly, Ah, Señora Costaño, I smelled a wonderful perfume in the Master's room. It- did it belong to his wife?

_That one? Yes, yes. Oh, it's a lovely scent, isn't it?_

Was it hers?

Only hers?

_Mmm. No, Lady Lovelace liked to wear one I made for another woman in town. She wasn't especially proprietary of it. But that's just like her. She was the most generous lady I ever met. When she died, I though it'd take poor Diego with him- oh, listen to me, gossiping like that._

It was sweet. A tinge of fruit and delicate. A wilting smell, ripe and gentle.

I cradled the bottle in my hand ten thousand times. Dusted myself with it and lay there and could see him, could see my God, his cheek nestled against my chest.

_You make me feel safe, Roberta._

Call me Rosarita.

Please.

Call me anything.

Don't only call me Roberta unless it's another Roberta.

Call me...

But in the dream, I only saw his fingers laced up through another woman's hair. His lips belonging to someone else. That little maid, that little whore.

His laughter cracking in my face.

_What, you? You think I love you? You think I care?_

He won't stop laughing in the dream.

When I hold him, he won't stop laughing, fugitive and flowing out of my fingers like fistfuls of salt. In the dream, he won't stop.

So I hit him and he still won't stop laughing.

His voice echoes off the walls. His laughter clashes in my ears.

He won't stop laughing so I feel his neck rubbery under my thumbs. The way I remember. The way Rosarita remembers.

The Bloodhound remembers.

Don't laugh at me.

Why won't you love me?

I need your love. That's all I need.

_You think your love means shit to me, Roberta?_

I love you. Don't you love me? Doesn't that mean _anything_ to you, Master- no, Garcia? Doesn't my love mean anything to you, Garcia?

Sarah fucked him. The boy. I watched her get ready, transfixed with herself in the mirror. Watched the seventeen-year-old girl in the mirror become a woman with the same eyes like jadeite, cheap foundation looking like a model's airbrushed perfection on her skin, darkening her lids, a wedding-night production or at least readying herself for a boyfriend, for a lover.

She had big breasts. I remember they stayed big, soft, even when everything else hardened. Just like her thighs, that teenage springiness with a tinge of fat.

_Watch me, won't you, Rosarita?_

I didn't know what the hell to tell her.

No? Jesus, what's your problem, Sarah?

I was in love with her eyes. With her smile. With her skin.

I nodded. I watched, standing in the hut's door, a web of its odors pinching my nose. Sex.

My god, the sex. Stale cum's stink like baking soda and hay and grass and sweat and his tears before they dried up like everything else.

His face was beautiful. When you wanted to use him, they'd let the boy bathe. He looked perfect. He was divine. Long and fine and with hair grown out and glossy-black. Sarah's was naturally honeyed, bright against her well-tanned skin.

His body traced with scars. Puckered from cigarettes and his soles charred almost crusty and his fingers shaking but his eyes boiled down to rheumy flat plates.

_H-hi, I'm..._

Sarah hit him in the face so sweetly. Knelt down on the old creaking mattress giving under her knee and closed her right hand in a fist and hit him.

_I don't give a fuck about your name. I'm here to make you scream, you little whore._

She did.

Made him cry.

Stamped her hips on his and wrapped her fingers around his neck and I didn't want to listen to her, didn't want to hear the words caroming off the rusty iron walls reeking of blood like everything else.

_You think it's fun, huh, you piece of shit?! You stupid goddamned whore; I'll show you fucking **fun**. I'll show you fun. You think I'm cute, don't you? Don't you think I'm just adorable, a real perfect ten, right? I'll fucking show you._

I'd seen it ten thousand times through my own eyes but never like that before. He wasn't a man but he had a man's cock, a man's shapes between her thighs which was really all that mattered, right? It was big. Big for his fine little body and it filled her, bulged out her pussy's soft hairless skin, Sarah's hair fanned out over her shoulders and her hips looked impossibly wide like she was eating him alive.

I watched his balls pulse. Twitch.

_I'm bored, little girl._

The way her voice came hollow like she was reading from a script except it jolted in her neck when the words floated out.

_Why don't you just come, huh, you piece of shit? That's all you're good for; a warm body._

He did.

Strained and white shone vaguely around her. Her ass trembled. Her body strained and her shoulders hardened and she hit him again.

Turned back to me with a look over her shoulder.

_Wow, you should have a turn, too, Rosa._

In the dream, Garcia laughs, and I can't stop squeezing his neck until he's not laughing anymore. He's not doing anything.

He's fine, he's giggling, flaying the soul out of my body with those eyes, and suddenly he can't breathe. A man's or a woman's trachea crushes under enough pressure and there's no hope without emergency surgery, without a tracheotomy.

He's dying.

It's too far.

He's dying and all I can do is pray for him to wake up, after all he's said, after the hideous things he's done.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

"I love you." I watched the woman in the mirror, the beauty with her wolf's eyes bright blue and muddied with the shadow, with her red lips, with her dark skin, with her big breasts cupped in a filmy nightgown like a thin waterfall of cream.

Her stockings and her high white heels and her hair loose and still dewy from the shower and combed and set.

"I love you." It was the truth. I could see the truth in her eyes.

The hallway was made from gelatin, bowing and shaking under my heels, their quiet _tic-tic-tic_ muffled with the deep burgundy carpeting thrown over bare wood. Moonlight leaked blue and silver with the air through the opened window casements.

Master Garcia's room was always just down the hall.

All the time.

Master Diego told me it was for his protection.

_Roberta- yes, Roberta. Do you know what really domesticates even the fiercest beast?_

I could tell him, Yes, Master Diego, I do know.

We stood in the study where he'd hidden me the first time, the filthy matted wolf with her boots crusted in shit, wrapped behind his heavy curtains. Master Garcia tossing a ball to the little cotton puff with its bright black eyes and glistening nose bouncing around on the driveway.

Both of us looked down at him with the same eyes.

Almost the same eyes.

The hall's ceilings were tall, vaulted. They stretched on into darkness to my right and to the left was the moonlight. Master Garcia's door was like mine, high and delicately curved in Arabesque elegance. The little maid's room was in the next wing after the staircase.

I felt my heart stamp itself with my ribs.

My lungs burned.

I smelled her. She invaded every sense.

The woman who became Master Diego's Goddess.

A quiet rap at Master Garcia's door.

He said nothing. It would've been easier that way, wouldn't it? In my dream, I could've let him scourge me with that voice, with those eyes, with that laughter.

My knuckles hit it again. Louder.

I could turn around.

I could do anything else.

I could smile and tell him there was nothing to worry about, there was a noise in the hall, did you hear that, Master Garcia?

Instead, the door opened, and I was still standing there. He was beautiful. I never believed in angels as a little girl. Daddy and mama never talked about them. There was the vision of our Lord in His death suspended over the mantel blackened with smoke.

They weren't religious. They were faithful, but not religious, and never thought of anything but Jesus being, yes, the vessel for the Holy Spirit. But he was not the Son of God.

God, they told me, could never have a son.

Master Garcia looked like a vision of the divine. I believed in angels at that second, the mussed hair still so perfect, so soft. He was older, of course, but the same as that beautiful boy with his puppy in the portrait. His arms slender but a little firmer; his legs longer and grown a little more muscular with the games we played outside together.

He played sometimes with the little one. Splashed around with her in the pool.

Master Diego said it was maybe a little much to have Master Garcia playing with me in the pool. His lips pursed a little.

_Ah, Roberta, you know... A twelve-year-old boy might, ah, get ideas, seeing a woman as beautiful as you in a bathing suit. Please, make use of the pool, but, um, maybe... Not while Garcia's there. Do you think that's unreasonable?_

I thought it was unreasonable he didn't make the same demands of the little one. The little one who wasn't so little. The little one with her big breasts and her soft skin and her sharp eyes.

They weren't my eyes. They weren't a wolf's eyes. But they weren't domesticated, either. I could smell the reek of the street shit and pain and regret on her skin.

She didn't know yet what was needed for a beast to be domesticated.

Master Garcia's eyes looked up at me under his lashes. He wore only the nightshirt he usually did, one of Master Diego's old dress shirts, floaty and oversized around his slim shoulders. It was half-open over his chest and a glint of the smooth square shapes were enough to kill the breath in my lungs.

"R-Roberta?" He wasn't asleep. I knew that. I knew his drowsy voice, the way it stumbled over the words. He looked.

Stared.

"Good evening, Master Garcia. It's not too late, is it?"

"It's... Um, it's after eleven."

"Tomorrow is a day off, isn't it? The Sabbath. The Lord's day." His eyes fell at my chest's height. He swallowed.

"Uh, yeah, it- it is, isn't it, um, Roberta?"

"Master Garcia, may I come in?" It felt like corruption to use the voice Comandanta Valeria taught me, the huskiness, the soft private whisper wet and soft sounding like it came from a man's ear. Or a woman's.

No matter how far away you were.

But this wasn't corruption. The door was half-open and his bed stand light was on. The bedding was like mine: White, crisp, refreshed almost every day.

But there was a man's smell in the room. Bitter and sharp and briny. One pillow was set a little higher than the other.

A golden crucifix sat on the wall over his bed. It was his mother's.

"Are you alone, Master Garcia?"

He didn't even blink.

"Um, well, yeah. I... I haven't had a sleepover for awhile. I..." Master Garcia's eyes fell a little.

"Did you have a falling-out with your friend, Juan?"

"No. No." It was a lie. "It... He just wasn't as good a friend as I thought. That's all."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Would you like to talk about it?" Please.

Anything to get me through the door.

His calves twitched a little. His toes toyed over the floor.

"Uh, I..."

"Master Garcia, may I come in?"

"With- with me?" When his palms settled down on his thighs, another shape surfaced out of it.

Between them.

Hungry and twitching.

"Of course. With you. I..." I wasn't wearing my glasses, was I?

"You're not wearing your glasses, Roberta."

"No. I- I was sleeping. I had a bad dream, Master Garcia."

"Oh. I... You did? You have bad dreams, too, Roberta?"

"Far too many."

"Sure. Come- come in." The room was rich with him. I'd been in there how many times? How many times had I lain on the mattress with the door closed or sometimes open, daring someone to see me, to catch me with my hand knifing between my thighs, feeling all the smooth skin and fat and muscle shiver with the visions of his body hot and bare against me?

There was a smell I'd only caught once or twice in his used bedding.

But hotter.

Sharper.

He sat on his bed's edge. I closed the door behind me. And locked it. Slowly. Discreetly. A technique I'd mastered serving someone else's will. No one ever knew.

He didn't know.

I knew my walk. I saw it in his eyes, the way they followed my hips, the metronomic swing scattering a faint wash of the perfume he could never remember.

Sitting next to him.

So close.

A warm wet breeze washed through his open balcony door, teased my shoulders.

"S-so, um, you... You had a nightmare, Roberta?"

"Master Garcia?" His head barely reached my shoulder when I looked down at him. His breath was fragrant with his mint toothpaste.

"Y-yes?"

"Do you remember when I'd comfort you?"

"Yeah. Of course. It... I always felt so good when you'd do it, Roberta."

"Master Garcia?"

"Yes?" Those big generous eyes turned everything to hot pink gel in my head.

"Do you remember what you told me back in that horrible place? Roanapur?"

"I... We talked a lot."

"But do you remember what you told me, Master Garcia? That you'd always protect me? That you were my guardian?"

"I... That was kinda big talk, wasn't it?" His laughter was a short perfunctory bark. "But that- that oriental woman, the nasty punk with the big mouth, she was-

"I don't think so. You're becoming a man, Master Garcia. Do you know that?" I could see he was becoming a man.

Maybe he wasn't like Telemachus, but he was a gentle and beautiful boy. Maybe he'd never have whiskers on his face.

"I- what?"

"You're becoming a man. You'll inherit this estate, yes, but that isn't what I mean. Your father, he will still be here for a good long time. You'll need to forge out in your own life, to take your own direction."

"W-well, it's still awhile-"

"I was a young girl when I... When I had to leave home, Master Garcia. It's wonderful you won't need to. But there's nothing wrong with growing up. It's- it's beautiful in so many different ways." My voice sounded almost like a little girl's, too.

Maybe sixteen, seventeen.

At most.

I could taste the shiver shaking through him when my fingers creased his naked thigh.

"Roberta-"

"Do you like the name Roberta, Master Garcia?" His eyes looked a little bleary when my nails pricked at his knee.

"U-uh, what do you mean?"

"You know my real name now. Rosarita. Do you like it more?"

"It's- isn't it for you to choose-"

"But you're my Master, Master Garcia. You're... Do you want to know a secret?" I turned. Fully. "I told you there should be no secrets between us, but there are _always_ things people don't tell each other." My voice got thicker.

Hotter.

Closer to him.

"For them. For us. You know that, yes? After all, you don't tell _me_ the truth all the time, do you?"

His eyes looked hunted.

"W-what-"

"Well, you were doing something a boy shouldn't really be doing alone."

He didn't say anything.

Heat washed red in his cheeks.

"It's- it's- I mean, in all the books- and I don't think- I mean, I know the Church says it's wrong, but-" panicky. His voice was a ghost of words.

"I don't mean it's _wrong_. I just... Mean it's like rubbing your belly to cure your hunger." His thigh was silky, warm and tight and soft like a girl's under my palm. Slipping down to his knee and rising higher again 'til his nightshirt's tails spread out.

He was a man. A little thicket of curls his hair's color but tighter, crinklier, cresting what I knew it always would be. It was perfect; a fat head bulging helmeted and hard and reddened almost purpled arcing over a hairless pouch straining with so much it must've been torment.

"R-Roberta-"

"Do you want to call me Rosarita, Master Garcia?" He barely looked like he knew what was happening 'til I filled his eyes. So close my brow creased his; so close his nose would've marked my glasses.

"I- Roberta... You're Roberta to me, Roberta. Remember? R-r-remember what I told you?"

"Yes. I do." I wanted to weep. Weep like a child. Weep like a bride on her wedding night. His voice's strength in my ears. "I do remember, Master Garcia-"

"You don't have to call me _Master_ , you know-"

"But you are my master-"

"B-but... I don't... I don't like it, Roberta." I didn't know what to tell him. What to do.

So I did nothing.

"I like- I wish you'd just call me _Garcia_. That... It would make me happy, you know?"

"Really? All- my only wish is to make you happy, Ma-" felt my throat close around the word. The muscle memory reflex in it. "Garcia."

It sounded beautiful in my mouth.

"Garcia." It sounded beautiful on my tongue.

"Garcia." It sounded like speaking the name of God. "My God, Garcia, you... Your name- I-"

"Roberta?"

I wanted to cry. But there were no tears. Instead, it was my hand on his thigh. Dimpling the sweet skin and coaxing a little trill out of his lips.

"I love you, Garcia. I love you. Do you know that?"

"Roberta-"

"I love you. And I'm in love with you. There's... Such an important difference." My hand creased his skin higher, higher.

Higher.

I watched. Watched the words glide through his hazel eyes.

Felt something hot and wet tighten like a naked snake around my belly.

When I touched him, reached that place, his cock's wet skin, it was a snap of orgasm. A sharp white light behind my eyes. A sizzle and snap in my nerves.

Tightening inside me. Squeezing. Crushing.

So fucking _empty_ it was a lonely death, unseen, unmarked.

"A-ah-"

"Roberta-"

"I feel... So wonderful. Don't you? Don't you love me, Garcia?" I wanted to kiss him.

I needed to kiss him.

I kissed him. Slowly, slowly, his lips so fine, small like a girl's against mine. Tasting those soft pink bows. The way his cock twitched and flapped between teasing fingertips and his belly and back again when we moved together.

When his mouth slipped open when my tongue flicked at his teeth. The way his eyes sank half-closed and his breath hitched in his slender chest. The way his mouth scalded me; the way he tasted like warm mint and unplaceable feelings of sweet wet heat; the way his tongue slipped out and knotted with mine and tore every morsel of sense out of my head and shredded it and scattered it like confetti in the air saturated with his scent, with mine.

With the perfume.

His cock was larger than I'd even hoped. Big enough the head jutted out of my hand and rose over the knuckles and throbbed, beat back against every slow gentle squeeze. His lips froze; his spine was jelly.

I didn't blame him.

Orgasm snaked between my ears again. Turned into a hot red light hounding down and swallowing every bit of sanity left.

"R-Roberta-"

"I know I interrupted you when you were feeling good. But how does this feel? Are you close? You... I almost feel sad I couldn't bring you your first orgasm, Garcia-"

"I- I'm sorry, Roberta." Mast- Garcia's head sank back, his eyes shook.

"Don't be sorry. You're becoming a man. I couldn't... Couldn't really hope for that."

"I- I was... Was thinking about you."

I kissed him. Again. Kissed him and kissed him 'til my breath was dead in my chest and I could barely think about his. Touched him; squeezed and massaged his cock, ate its every little pulse.

Felt it growing harder.

Harder.

Tightening in my hand.

"Garcia-"

"I- I really was thinking about you. About... About us. T-together. I just..."

"You want to look at my body, right, Garcia?" He did.

"I- I want to look at your eyes, your-"

"But I love it when you watch my body, Garcia." His whine was almost a kid's when my hand fled away from his cock.

Left it pounding there between his thighs.

"R-Roberta, I- I was- was gonna-"

"Oh, don't worry, Master." I stood. Felt space crack around me. I wanted him to watch. "Please, watch me, Garcia."

"You- you called me _Master_ again-"

"Because you are my Master. Don't think for a moment you're not just because your eternal servant calls you by your given name, my love. Watch me. I'm begging you." I did beg.

I pleaded, on my knees even standing on those heels. Preening for him. Eating him eating me alive with his eyes. His hand stole between his legs. I knew he couldn't help it.

Couldn't take it away when my nightgown melted off, floated away into an unseen shadow on the floor.

When I stood there wearing nothing but the high white heels catching and scattering the light like my skin misty with sweat, legs painted with the stockings.

Big breasts I knew he'd always seen, always wondered _how_ he saw them.

A mother's.

Or a wife's.

Now I knew. Heavy, gently upturned, nipples thick and set in darker discs wide and silky and screaming with sensitivity turning his every every faraway breath into a hurricane.

I looked down. Looked at them. They weren't just bags of fat.

They were beautiful when he watched them, too. My heart screamed like everything else. Tightened and burned in my gut.

"Uh-uh-uh, Garcia. Unless... Unless you _order_ me to let you touch yourself while you watch me, I'm afraid that's forbidden. We can't waste one stroke, can we? One little caress?" His hand stopped. "Even a young man still has his limits, right?

"We don't want to waste that."

"N- no way, and..."

"How many times tonight, Garcia?"

"Twice?" His voice tightened, too. "That's- that's so embarrassing-"

"Were you thinking about this?" About his hands displacing mine, grazing my shoulders, my neck, my tits, my waist, my hips.

Sinking between thighs I felt straining.

Peeling myself apart for him. Totally bare, too. Waxed and polished away every stripe and strand of hair like a young girl.

It was pink inside me.

Dripping.

Scalding and juicy and overripe like a boiled peach when my fingertip just creased it.

I wanted to scream.

It died, turned into a strangled whimper growing wings and taking flight through my nose.

"Garcia, G-Garcia, you're... I want... Garcia, I want you. I want you here. I want you to make love to me. I want... However you want.

"However you thought about it."

I wanted to hit the floor.

To die, to become a pillar of salt.

It would be smiling if he'd just touch me.

"Come- come with me, Roberta. Please."

I lay on the bed.

Watched his ceiling. The ceiling belonging to him.

To those visions dropping down my neck like a red curtain.

His face.

He kissed me again. Kissed me ten thousand times, for ten thousand years.

"We- uh, Roberta..." He kissed, and kissed, and kissed me. Finally touched me. His hands small like a girl's, quick. Warm. Smooth without labor, without pain.

Adoring.

Yes.

Kneading my tits, peeling my nerves, working them together the way he did my nipples with every little squeeze, every touch.

"I- I want it, Garcia. I want... I want you inside me." I loved it.

Loved the simpleminded shock in his face when the words rolled through his ears.

"Roberta-"

"I mean it, Garcia. I want you to make love to me. Do it however you want. However feels best for you. Every- every time you touch me, I feel like I'm coming alive. More and more. Don't stop. Please.

"That's- that's the only request I'll ever make of you." It sounded like something the fantasy, the selfish solipsistic vision of a woman lurking in a man's head would say.

_Oh, don't ever hurt me._

_Make me feel small._

_Weak._

_Fuck me as long as you want, however you want._

Except that's not what he saw. Not when I felt his hands on my thighs. His fingers roam and pour between them.

When they reached my pussy and peeled it open. Slid with nervous smoothness inside me and quirked and curled and searched and explored and teased and melted every nerve to slag. Sent my head straining back onto the pillow under my neck and my toes curling and my smell fanning out around the room, a scent of the perfume boiling with my sweat and my body melting down and his sweat a crisp little tinge through the hot night air getting hotter and hotter with every little touch.

"G-Garcia!" Felt my eyes spring open.

I watched him.

Watched him like a frightened wolf in the undergrowth, yellow eyes blue, his eyes narrowed, fingers twisted inside me and they were clumsy in the most beautiful way.

It was awkward, yes. Beautifully awkward. Missing my clit twenty and thirty and forty times but always trying to find it 'til he finally finally _finally_ did.

My fingers knotted in his hair.

Orgasm snapped in my head.

"Oh, God! God! Garcia!" Weren't they the same?

His cock was a slippery lash against my pussy when he finally kissed me again. When he lay between my thighs and looked so small, so vulnerable.

Beautiful.

"R-Roberta, uh-"

"It isn't hard, Garcia." I think my laughter could've melted the ice caps. "That is, it isn't _difficult_. You..." Felt harder than steel. "Just... Just try to find that little- little ridge inside me and-"

And the struggling was its own delight.

Watching his hips waggle.

His eyes get glassy and his cock grind against me and miss that spot again, again, ten times, before he finally hit it. Felt that swollen head reach into me, blunt hot scraping every nerve to yowling mania.

Carve itself through me.

It was empty before. Impossibly empty and now it was filling with him, pushing deeper, deeper, deeper.

His eyes were crazed, idiotic. Like mine.

Squeezing and sleeved around him.

"Garcia! Garcia! Kiss me!"

Yes, I kissed him.

Kissed and ate him and his movements were mine, were hips mirrored, a sound like a fist driven into water.

Overflowing with him. With the juices smearing my skin and rolling down my ass and the room shuddering and his eyes half-lidded and the walls melting.

Orgasm, my God the orgasm I'd never had before, the perfection with his hands in mine, dragging him closer, closer. Soft crack of heels knotted in the bedding, his knees on the sheets.

"R-Roberta!"

"Yes. Yes. Yes." I could feel it. Feel it stiffening, puffing up, finally flashing inside me. Gushing in long tidal convulsions, my body wrapped around him, dragging him deeper and deeper 'til he drowned.

I died.

Died ten thousand times. Died with that gooey flare of heat in a last hair-trigger orgasm bigger than anything I'd ever felt.

The sound of his hips still working, everything falling apart, shambolic anarchic insane.

Fucking me. Fucking and fucking me until he just stopped, gulped down breath like water in the desert.

He kissed me again.

It shrank a little inside me. Slipped away in a velvety runnel of his cum I knew was stark white and gloppy with its big virile pearls and messy clods and that smell of copper and salt and sweat.

Sank his face against my chest. His breathing slowed, settled, his back a patient rise and fall under my fingernails.

"I love you, Garcia."

I loved him more than anything.

He was quiet but he didn't laugh, and he didn't cry.

He was always a beautiful boy. I will always remember it.


End file.
